


Exchange

by Miss_M



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Dancing, Developing Relationship, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 10:00:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26850085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: “I don’t dance.”Lisa rolled her eyes – a moon’s turn in his company had made her bold. “I know youdon’t, butcanyou?”
Relationships: Dracula/Lisa (Castlevania)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 69
Collections: Shipoween 2020 - The Halloween Ship Exchange!





	Exchange

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nary](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nary/gifts).



> This is an extra treat. I own nothing.

“They’re called automata,” Dracula said with a flourish of his long arm, his cape rustling.

Lisa raised an eyebrow at this obvious remark, but she did not begrudge her host wanting to impress her. Her threshold for wonder had risen steadily since her arrival at the castle a moon’s turn ago. She no longer gaped and rushed like a green girl up to every bubbling alembic or parchment scroll – it took quite a lot to make her breath catch in her throat now.

“How wonderful,” she said and ran her fingers down the arm, made of painted tin, belonging to one of the windup musicians. 

There were three of them, and they looked vaguely human, though taller, almost as tall as Dracula, and spindly, like they were starving. Their faces were smooth, blank ovals, and their painted-on clothes were green (for the violinist), blue (for the flutist), and crimson (for the harpsichordist, who wore a wide tin skirt which covered the stool on which she sat).

“Would you like to hear them play?” Dracula asked, while Lisa circled the musical trio on their raised dais in a corner of the library. 

Lisa threw him a look – when had she ever said no to some new morsel of knowledge? 

Dracula smiled at her expression. “Between their shoulder blades, you will find the key to wind them up.”

Lisa felt along the harpsichordist’s smooth spine till she found the key, and wound. She thought about what a vulnerable spot this was on a human body – in a person’s blind spot, the spinal column lying just under the skin. Whoever had made the automata must have shared a vampire’s view of the human anatomy. Lisa shuddered a little while the harpsichordist lifted her tin hands and began to play, and was joined within moments by the violinist and the flutist, wound up by Dracula himself.

Their instruments were the real thing, wood rather than painted tin, but the music they made sounded off somehow to Lisa’s admittedly untrained ear. She’d only ever heard beggars playing penny whistles and drums at village fairs, or a pipe organ echoing from churches which barred Lisa as an accused witch. She supposed this was the difference between the imperfect beauty that humans made – or could make, if they set their hearts on it – and the cool precision of a simulacrum of humanity. 

She stood by Dracula’s side and listened till the windup mechanisms wound down and, trailing off out of tune, the three musicians fell silent, the harpsichordist’s right hand still raised above the keys, the flutist’s instrument silent before his featureless face, and the violinist’s bow frozen at the start of what would have been a thunderous arc across the strings. 

“It’s quite lively, isn’t it?” Lisa said. “Let’s wind them up again.”

Dracula indulged her, and once the three musicians were playing the only tune of which they seemed capable, Lisa gathered her skirt and petticoat in her hands and tried out a few steps on the empty stretch of flagstones between a lectern and a bookcase which rose up into the gloom under the rafters.

“Is that what they dance on the village green in Lupu?” Dracula sounded amused. 

“Oh no,” Lisa replied, kicking her right foot up to her left knee before hopping onto her left foot and repeating the step. “Not just any old Sunday. This is a dance performed only at wedding feasts.” 

Too late to snatch her words back out of the air, Lisa felt her cheeks heat up and hoped her exertions would account for it, even as she also caught Dracula studying her feet and ankles and calves as she moved across the floor. Like she was a curious automaton herself, or like he was unused to humans being so, well, _lively_ in his presence.

Lisa cut straight across the space between them, doing a step she always thought of as a horse’s trot, clip clop the heel the toes, one foot in front of the other, till she was dancing in place before Dracula’s motionless form. 

Lisa held out her arms: “Dance with me.” Like he was hers to command. Her feet never stopped moving.

“I don’t dance.”

Lisa rolled her eyes – a moon’s turn in his company had made her bold. “I know you _don’t_ , but _can_ you?”

Dracula watched her from his great height, and for only a moment, the space of one dance step, Lisa feared that she’d grown too bold in his company.

Dracula’s long fingers swallowed up Lisa’s hands when he took them, their fingers intertwining – more like children playing a game than dancers pairing up at a wedding feast – his long fingernails rasping softly across the backs of Lisa’s hands and wrists. His hands were cool, not like tin, or stone, or anything mineral. Cold flesh. _Dead_ flesh.

Lisa swung her hips from side to side, trying to shake off the chill which ran up her spine, and said, “And one, and two, and right foot first…” 

Dracula swayed from side to side, moving his great body more slowly to match her speed, and led her across the floor of his library, a respectful foot of space remaining always between their bodies, their hands clinging together and their feet moving in perfect harmony.

 _A vampire has preternatural coordination, sharp reflexes_ , Lisa thought, her breath coming short from the dancing and her mind seizing on didacticism lest she be carried away by the moment.

“Watch out,” she called out as her skirt brushed against a heavy oaken lectern, and Dracula barely flexed his arms but Lisa felt the strength in him flow from his arms into hers. In mid-step, he lifted her clean off the floor, swung her in a half-circle over the lectern, her skirts flying, her left foot passing close enough to a bookcase that she felt the ghost of impact but no pain, a half-squeal, half-gasp winging out of her throat.

Down he brought her, in an arc which seemed to span half the library, an exercise in applied elliptic geometry, and set her on her feet again. Lisa wavered a little when Dracula let go of her hands, and the music died in a jarring cadence as the automata wound down.

Lisa watched Dracula while she sweated, and gasped for breath, and felt her ankles and knees and the soles of her feet heat up and throb gently. He returned her gaze, looking neither flushed nor out of breath, yet something about his face suggested an inner perturbation. _What will you give me in exchange for my knowledge?_ he’d told her on that first day. _What will you give me in exchange for mine?_ Lisa wondered now.

“Again?” she gasped, then laughed at how hoarse she sounded.

Dracula smiled, his fangs showing, and bowed, his hand extended for her to take. She enfolded the second and third knuckles of his fingers – between the murderous nails and the palm of his hand, dangerous in a different way – in her sweating fingers and, though she could walk perfectly well on her own, she let him draw her to the dais where the automata waited.


End file.
